Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[kimknapp]

I have been trying to understand a problem I have had for a while:

I have 5 zones. I put all music in the 1st zone and let it play randomly. I have one zone with a few albums in it for party music, one for music we listen to in our pool room, one that my wife can program to her liking and one for me. All zones can play continuously, as the outputs are actually turned on and off by our Audio Access system. So, in short, Media Center is continously playing as many as 5 zones worth of music at all times, day and night.
The problem is that one zone locks up occasionally. This is almost always the "all music" zone. When it happens, that zone stops playing, but the play/pause button is still in the play mode (ie, it shows a pause symbol). Hitting the button does nothing. The only way to get the zone going again is to select another song in the playing now list, hitting the next song or previous song buttons, or double clicking (reselecting) the current song in the play now list.
I thought that when I updated to the current release the problem went away, but it is happening again, more frequently now that I connected netremote. Without netremote and before I updated, it would go up to a couple of days, at most before locking up. After the update to latest version, it went about 5 days before I started testing with netremote. After running netremote, it happens in less than a day.

Any ideas?

[JimH]

IF Netremote made a difference, I wonder if there is a problem with PC memory or a memory leak in some software (including drivers).

In the FAQ on this board, there is a link to a post by Omni about system tests.

[kimknapp]

More info: The music server runs Win 2003 Server. So, I installed everything on another computer with Win XP with the same results. I also updated the Win 2003 with same results. I have done extensive hw tests in the past on the music server (including long term memtest and a hard drive test) and found it to be rock solid.
I am now running MC on the Win XP computer without running the NetRemote stuff to double check that it still does the same thing. As I mentioned in the original post, this has been an ongoing problem before I even loaded NetRemote. After I updated MC to the latest build I thought the problem went away, but I think it just didn't happen as quickly.
If you want to similate the problem, I have 5 zones, four have 10 or 20 songs, one has the entire library (over 6000 songs). Start all three zones and let them run continuously. Do not reboot the computer or restart MC. One of the zones will hang after a while (anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days).
I had the same problem when I was trying to get Music Lobby (Cinemar) to run and the guys over there said they never had the problem, but after getting more info from them I found that they reboot every day or turn off the zones regularly.

[Matt]

Could you try MC 11.1?

There was an issue where once a file failed to play for any reason, the player wouldn't automatically advance to the next track.  It sounds like this could be what is happening.

Let us know.  Thanks.

[kimknapp]

Thanks, dling it now, and will try it a little later today. I assume it is a pretty stable release (other than new features, which I am not using)?

[kimknapp]

How do I run "Media Center.exe /register"? I tried running it in the cmd window. And directly from the run... command line.

[Matt]

How do I run "Media Center.exe /register"? I tried running it in the cmd window. And directly from the run... command line.

Tonight's build (71) will register automatically.

Start Menu > Start > Run... will let you run programs.

[kimknapp]

Thanks, I got the right combination. Needed the whole path. Works now.
I'll let you know if I have the zone lockup problem with this version.

[kimknapp]

Thanks. Going through the updating of MC to 11.1 inadvertently fixed another problem. I found that Cinemar's Music Lobby plugin was still installed and removing it stopped NetRemote's Media Server from leaking memory. It would add about 100MB a day before, whereas now, with it removed, and with 5 zones playing continuously, iNetRemote Server stays at about 50MB.
So far, no zone lockup.